The Peanut Gallery

Pursuing a fleeing target. Researching and writing a term paper. Exploring a hundred mile swathe of jungle. Casing a military base. Treating third degree burns. Building IKEA furniture. All these things don’t quite fit into the previous three, but you may find yourself doing one or more of these at some point. These would obviously be done with checks and gambits. If you need to mix these as part of a greater goal, it’s probably a challenge.

Let’s go over this very broadly.

A check is used when there is uncertainty about the outcome of an action, or a gambit if the action is complex and/or significant.

If you’re chasing someone, or athletically competing against another, you would use Athletics, or maybe Acrobatics, against the same. A game of football, wrestling, competitive tag. Opposed checks and gambits are common here.

Research, exploration, and investigation are all methods of information gathering at their core. Occult, Survival, and Investigation come to mind, but others might be fit in, depending on the situation. Checks and gambits aren’t really opposed, given their solitary natures; there isn’t really a way to oppose these in the context of opposed rolls.

Medicine and crafting use Medicine and often Engineering, though the latter could be substituted with Occult, depending on the context. For the same reasons as the information gathering above, these too tend not to have opposed checks or gambits.

This is not to say these are the only other ways skills could be used, but these are the most common. This is Sburb, unique cases are everywhere.

Stakes dice from roleplay and context is difficult to say without giving a three page list. Remember from the start of the chapter that in general, you receive one Stakes die for something that helps you in some way. Two dice if it was incredibly helpful. Consider this in terms of effect, time, and scale. If something lets them do it with increased effect, decreased time taken, or lets them do more of it, for example.

For alchemy, consider three questions: “Can I use this to do something I couldn’t do before?”, “Can I already do something, but this lets me do it better?”, and “Can I already do something, but this lets me do it more easily?”. Good alchemy says “Yes!” to at least one of these questions.